This blog features news and events associated with Asian Australian Studies. Asian Australian Studies is a growing field that investigates the diasporic cultures, politics and histories of those of Asian descent in Austalia.
All information is sourced from the AASRN (Asian Australian Studies Research Network) and its members. For more information about the AASRN, visit our website at: www.asianaustralianstudies.org

Reality Dreams is a new book of poetry by Ouyang Yu, published by Picaro Press. It's available for $15.00, plus postage, Australia-wide.

What is reality? What are dreams? What are reality dreams or dream realities? These poems collected here are a profound exploration into the borderlands of dream and reality where the two become one and death re-dies, only to live again.

The original manuscript consists of 218 poems but this prepared manuscript comprises only 117 poems.

Enquiries to jcjohnson@iinet.net.au

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These unsettling, breezily imaginative poems are reminiscent of deep-night jottings in an analysand’s bedside notebook. In Reality Dreams Ouyang Yu cooks up something much more complex than a simple surrealist recipe. Once you enter his dreamworld, his stunning imagery never lets you drift off. This poetry is perplexing, comical, sometimes elegiac, sometimes mysterious, often frankly visceral, sexy and sensual. Here, in one world-weary reverie, Australia is ‘so deadly boring, so boringly dead’ that we can only hope that a fearsome Chinese phantom might suddenly awaken the entire place by shouting thunderously loudly, ‘Onya Ouyang!’— Pam Brown

Ouyang Yu’s poetry takes energy — a kind of fission — from the forced collision of Chinese and English, of Chinese and Western conventions, habits of thought, and manners of expression. A definite energy and vigour arise from their enjambement. The facture can be deliberately rough and direct, offering opportunity for wonderful elisions of scene and logic that these dream poems enable. The poems reflect an urgent attempt at orientation, a navigation of the foreign, and of the familiar becoming strange.— Ken Bolton

An explosion of queer colour comes to Sydney this August with the inaugural South Asian Queer Film Festival, Gulmohar.

The three-day festival kicks off on 15 August 2008 to coincide with India’s 61st Independence day, and is bound to create controversy back home in India where private consensual sex between same-sex partners is still a criminal offence.

With a mix of films, short films and documentaries, Trikone Australasia hopes to increase visibility of the queer South Asian community in Australia and also send a message to South Asian countries, such as India and Bangladesh, where an individual’s choice of being in a same-sex relationship is still seen as a crime. “The aim of the festival is visibility, voice, vision,” says festival director Sadhana Jethanandani. “With Gulmohar, we want to increase visibility of the South Asian queer community in Australia. Voice their emotions and express their feeling through films about and made in South Asian countries. And ultimately become part of theglobal vision of providing equal rights to the South Asian LGBQT community,” adds Jethanandani.

We are very honoured and excited to announce that, the festival will be opened by Anton Enus. A broadcast journalist with more than 20 years' experience, Anton currently presents the World News on SBS. He was a founding member of South Africa's gay and lesbian sports movement in the early 1980s and he has also served on committees aimed at reconciling Johannesburg's multi-cultural gay and lesbian communities.

One of the highlights of the festival is, of course, the Australian premier of the highly provocative Indo-UK flick, Yours Emotionally (2006), which kicks off the festival on Friday 15 August. It tells the story of two UK-born boys, Ravi and Paul, who visit India for a holiday and witness an all-night gay-sex party.

Trikone Australasia is a registered non-profit organization set up in 2007. It aims to offer a supportive, empowering and non-judgemental environment, where queer South Asians can meet, make connections and proudly promote awareness and acceptance of their sexuality in society.

University of Queensland Postdoctoral Research Fellowships for Women 2009

The University of Queensland (UQ) invites applications for three Postdoctoral Research Fellowships for Women to commence in 2009. The Fellowships are open to women with a PhD or equivalent qualification, whose academic careers have been interrupted, delayed or otherwise constrained by family or other responsibilities. This includes applicants who are precluded from applying for postdoctoral research fellowships in locations elsewhere. One fellowship is for full-time research over a period of three years while the other two are for half-time research over a period of three years. The research must be conducted at the University of Queensland in any of its disciplines.

The selection process will consider the alignment of the proposed research with research areas of existing strength, or research areas that Faculties/Institutes wish to develop as priorities.

The three Postdoctoral Research Fellowships for Women have been developed in accordance with the University’s research strategy to introduce special initiatives to advance women in research. The purpose of the Fellowships is to assist eligible women to enhance/re-establish their academic research careers.

To be eligible, applicants must possess a PhD degree or equivalent postgraduate experience; demonstrate clearly how their careers have been interrupted, delayed or otherwise constrained by family or other responsibilities (normally of a care-related nature); and possess Australian citizenship or permanent residency status.

Successful appointees are expected to commence in early 2009. The current salary range for the award is A$60,391 – A$64,827 p.a. (full-time) and approximately A$30,195 - A$32,413 p.a. (half-time), plus 17% superannuation. Each appointee will be entitled to maintenance funds of A$20,000 over the term of the Fellowship to support research costs. Appointees relocating from interstate or overseas will be entitled to reimbursement of travel and relocation costs.

28 July 2008

Chinese sport and propaganda posters and contemporary artists' responses to modern China.

Presented by the Sydney Olympic Park Authority to celebrate the Beijing Olympic Games, this historical exhibition provides insights into the events that shaped the lives of millions of Chinese people from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in August 1949 to the present day.

Featuring the work of 75 artists and three collaborative projects from China, Europe, Australia and the Asia Pacific, the exhibition comprises 65 propaganda posters from the Mao era and contemporary paintings, sculptures, installations and audio visual works that respond to modern China. Discover the history of China’s recent past through this fascinating exhibition.

The Association for the Study of Australasia in Asia (ASAA) is organising an international conference on Australian Studies at Kandy, Sri Lanka on 2-5 December 2008.

Abstracts not exceeding 200 words should reach a member of the Conference Committee by 20th August 2008. Papers should not exceed twenty five minutes in delivery although they could be amplified before publication.

Ouyang Yu talks about his new book at Readings Bookshop, Carlton 13 August 2008

Supported by Asialink, University of Melbourne.

Culturally diverse, On the Smell of an Oily Rag: speaking English, thinking Chinese and living Australian (Wakefield Press, 2008) draws examples from low and high culture and from the everyday and the literary life.

Ouyang Yu shows that they are closer together than we usually think. Based on the unique biji xiaoshuo (pen-notes fiction) genre and written in an accessible, readable and deliberately un-academic style, On the Smell of an Oily Rag is a seminal non-fiction book that creates its own genre of what Ouyang Yu calls, biji feixiaoshuo (pen-notes non-fiction), in its exploration of cultural, linguistic and literary similarities, differences and parallels between the English and the Chinese language in a distinctly Australian context. Ouyang edits Australia’s only Chinese literary journal, Otherland, and writes and teaches part-time in China and Australia.

This issue publishes general articles plus a section devoted to the Crisis of Memory. There are also many book reviews, a translation, essays and creative pieces. Issue 16, due out in December, will feature articles devoted to Walter Benjamin's "Force of Law."

CFP: Colloquy is presently seeking unsolicited submissions for Issue 17 as well as submissions that consider the theme "Alternative Visions: Philosophies of Freedom in South Asian Diasporic Writing." Students of postcolonial studies should find this area of particular interest, although as always Colloquy remains open to researchers from all areas of the humanities with a focus on critical inquiry and creative responses. This issue will be guest edited by Elin-Maria Evangelista, Isabella Ofner and Pooja Mittal.

This issue will also feature select postgraduate papers from the Communications and Media Studies conference, to be held in August 2008, on International and Intercultural Communications in the Age of Digital Media. These papers will consider current understandings of globalization and the most pressing questions facing media and communications scholars today, including relations between the empirical and the theoretical in media cultures in action, what ideas we use to make sense of them, and whether or not disciplinarity is even still a workable idea.

For more information about forthcoming issues and CFPs, please read the editorial of Issue 15 and check the Colloquy website from time to time for further announcements.

Now available online for purchase!100% of all proceeds go to the A/P/A Institute Graduate Assistant in Archives Fellowship

Yellow Peril: Collecting Xenophobia is a visual essay commemorating the "Archivist of the Yellow Peril: Yoshio Kishi Collecting for a New America" exhibition held at A/P/A Institute in 2005 and 2006, which was curated by John Kuo Wei Tchen with assistance from NYU alumni Dylan Yeats and Anne Kim. The book features images of yellow peril items that were on display and are in the Yoshio Kishi / Irene Yah Ling Sun Collection (made possible in large part by a donation made in memory of Dr. Wei Yu Chen) and provides a historical context/explanation of yellow peril and how this phenomenon came to be. Essay written by Dylan Yeats, Foreword by John Kuo Wei Tchen, photographs by Peter Wing (see the project portfolio on his website HERE), and book designed by Kiku Yamaguchi, BabyAlpaca Design, this beautiful publication is for sale for $18 from A/P/A Institute only, and all proceeds go towards funding the stipend portion of the Graduate Assistantship in A/PA Archives. For more information, email apa.archives@nyu.edu or call (212) 998-3700.

17 July 2008

Research Project - 2008: The Annotated Bibliography of English Studies (Routledge ABES, UK)

An International On-Line Bibliography

The Centre for Postcolonial Writing (CPW) is the Editor of the Postcolonial Literary Studies Section of Routledge’s On-line bibliography, the Annotated Bibliography of English Studies (ABES), which commenced in 1999 and has just been remodelled and relaunched for 2008.

Call for Contributing Annotators

The CPW is expanding its network of annotators in the area of Postcolonial Literature.

Our contributors write short annotated bibliographies of articles, monographs, edited collections and online products, that they consider to be valuable and necessary reading in the field.

We are seeking interested postgraduates, early career researchers and established scholars who specialise in:

Postcolonial literature in English from the non-Western world (Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the South Pacific)

Contributors will be required to provide short (200 word) annotations for 10-15 texts per year and be credited for their work. Contributors will keep the texts they annotate (if in hard copy) in lieu of payment.

14 July 2008

In a brief essay published in Parallax shortly after the 11th of September 2001, Homi K. Bhabha refutes the reductionism of the “clash of civilizations” explanation for the attacks in New York and Washington, DC, and the downed plane in a Pennsylvania field offered by too many commentators:“[T]he decision to implement and administer terror, whether it is done in the name of god or the state, is a political decision, not a civilizational or cultural practice.” Even as Bhabha makes this significant distinction, his comments point toward another question, necessarily subsequent to the events themselves: How have the political events of that September day, as well as their aftermath, affected cultural practice?

This edited collection, tentatively entitled “From Solidarity to Schism:9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the United States,” seeks to address that question through discussions of novels, short stories, and movies from wide-ranging geographical sites of cultural production. That is, the collection’s focus is on how writers and filmmakers from outside the US represent September the 11th and any of the far-reaching events that came about because of the attacks that day. Do these fictions and films, as cultural practices, inaugurate new narrative or formal devices in their efforts to represent the attacks and/or their fallout? What manner of critique is offered, if any? Have these fictions and films ushered in a new aesthetics of terror and its consequences?

This collection will be an important supplement to the US-centered cultural and critical production addressing 9/11, providing researchers and teachers alike with resources and contexts that will allow them to broaden their own examinations of related works.

Please send all inquiries and abstracts of no more than 500 words (or full drafts of between 4000-6000 words) to the editor, Cara Cilano, at cilanoc@uncw.eduby 20 August 2008. Complete essays chosen from the abstracts will be due by 1 November 2008. While the fictions and films may be in any language, the essays themselves should be in English, as should any citations of primary and secondary sources.

9 July 2008

This exhibition commences Wednesday 16 july and ends Saturday 2 August. The opening is Thursday July 17 6pm -8pm.

Each work in Reciprocal Interference is a meeting of two artistic sensibilities. The initiative of Hong Kong-based artist Carol Archer, the exhibition is a series of collaborations with five other artists:Sue Rawlinson (Bondi), Johanna Trainor (Newcastle), Sue Taylor (Googong), Mary Grehan (Ireland) and Even Mak (Hong Kong).

Reciprocal Interference? The phrase comes from Henri Bergson’s essay on laughter. When “two altogether independent series of events” come together, it may generate a comic effect, “the precise formula of which is very difficult to disentangle, by reason of the extraordinary variety of forms in which it appears”. Like the ingredients of a good joke, the works in the Reciprocal Interference exhibition are extremely diverse and could not have been predicted by their makers.

The first of these collaborations began in 2005, the others in 2006. Since then, packages of works-in-progress have been bouncing back and forth between Hong Kong, Ireland and Australia. Each picture in the exhibition results from a challenge posed by one artist and an answering visual intervention by another. No written instructions or descriptions arrived with the pictures. The collaborations proceeded via the combined visual language of painting, drawing, collage and photography. The process is important: these works, all motivated by a desire to creatively interact with another artist, could not have come into being in any other way.

A series of online blogs, each highlighting the work-in-progress of a particular collaboration, forms the virtual component of the project. Specific blog addresses accompany the images and all five blogs may be accessed at www.aboutreciprocalinterference.blogspot.com

8 July 2008

A UQ academic is overseeing a unique art project which will bridge the environmental and cultural history of Brisbane and Japan.

Dr Kumi Kato from the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies has received $50,000 in funding from Arts Queensland for the installation of a “sound garden” in the Roma Street Parklands, which should be completed in August and will be used as part of the 2008 Queensland Multicultural Festival.

Dr Kato said the site would provide a meditative public space whose central feature will be a purpose-built Japanese water harp, known as a suikinkutsu.

The harp will be installed by sinking an inverted earthenware pot into the ground, with drops of water falling through onto a permanent layer of water at the base creating a pleasant musical effect.

This will be accompanied by surrounding natural sounds such as the calls of birds and frogs, and those generated by trees, wind, water and human interaction.

“Such attentive listening allows the individual to create their own soundscape, so there is an element of performance art as well as experiencing audience reactions at any given time,” Dr Kato said.

The building of the sound garden will involve local architect Will Marcus working alongside Mr Kubo Yoshinobu, a master suikinkutsu builder from Kyoto who recently collaborated with Dr Kato with an installation in a Tasmanian forest.

“The installation will address the importance of public space in the ever-changing urban environment and will also help the general public to regain a sense of connection with the surrounding environment,” Dr Kato said.

“The space will be a learning area suitable for diverse interests, including an education in environment, visual and sound design, landscape design, architecture and sound engineering as well as having recreational and tourism implications.”

The project is the latest in a series of creative approaches to cultural heritage and sustainability issues designed by Dr Kato.

“The Roma Street Parklands is an ideal space for installing a suikinkutsu, as the area was once an important water source for the city of Brisbane, and also an early example of civil engineering – a drainage system – still remains. It was also an important gathering place for Indigenous people,” she said.

The Colloquium will be opened by Professor Rae Frances, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Monash University.

The Colloquium will look at the position of the Humanities within the University today. At the same time as the structure of research operative within the sciences is applied to the Humanities, economic models more appropriate to commercial enterprises are being used to regulate their overall funding. While there have been important and at times radical transformations within the Humanities these developments are not in synch automatically with these external transformations within the academic world.

The aim of this International Colloquium will be to think through possible futures for the Humanities. Given their overall development, equally given the pressure to which they have been subjected, the question to be addressed is straightforward: What does a defence of the Humanities involve today?

In this pathbreaking book sociologists Rosalind Chou and Joe Feagin examine, for the first time in depth, racial stereotyping and discrimination daily faced by Asian Americans long viewed by whites as the “model minority.” Drawing on more than 40 field interviews across the country, they examine the everyday lives of Asian Americans in numerous different national origin groups. Their data contrast sharply with white-honed, especially media, depictions of racially untroubled Asian American success. Many hypocritical whites make sure that Asian Americans know their racially inferior “place” in U.S. society so that Asian people live lives constantly oppressed and stressed by white racism. The authors explore numerous instances of white-imposed discrimination faced by Asian Americans in a variety of settings, from elementary schools to college settings, to employment, to restaurants and other public accommodations. The responses of Asian Americans to the U.S. racial hierarchy and its rationalizing racist framing are traced—with some Asian Americans choosing to conform aggressively to whiteness and others choosing to resist actively the imposition of the U.S. brand of anti-Asian oppression. This book destroys any naïve notion that Asian Americans are universally “favored” by whites and have an easy time adapting to life in this still racist society.